To W. E. Norris.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Dec. 23rd, 1896.
My dear Norris,
I respond with joy to your suggestion in your beautiful letter of two days ago—that I shall enable you to find a word from me on your table on the darkest a. m. of the year; in the first place because I am much touched by your attaching to any word of mine any power to comfort or charm; and in the second because I can well measure—by my own—your sense of a melancholy from which you must appeal. It is indeed a lugubrious feast and a miserable merriment. But it is something to spend the evil season by one's own poor hearthstone (save that yours is opulent), crouching over the embers and chuckling low over all the dreadful places where one is not! I've been literally pressed to go to two or three—one of them in Northumberland! (the cheek of some people!) and the reflection that I might be there and yet by heaven's mercy am not, does give a faint blush as of the rose to my otherwise deep depression. It is a mild, gray, rainless, sunless inoffensive sort of Xmas here—and the shop fronts look rather prettily pink and green and golden in the dear dirty old London streets—and I have ventured into three or four—but I do it, bless you, for nine and sevenpence half-penny, all told! No wonder you want epistolary balm if you're already in the fifties! Do you give them diamond necklaces and Arab horses all round?—But Torquay, I too intensely felt, has gorgeous ways of its own. Really it isn't bad here, for almost every one has left town. I have yet had nothing worse to suffer than a first night at the Lyceum—the too great Irvingism of which—mainly in Ellen Terry's box—had been, the same day, pleasantly mitigated, in advance, by Tessa Gosse in Sheridan's Critic. Tessa had a play and acted Mr Puff better than any of her blushing fellow-nymphs acted anything else. And on New Year's eve I go to her parents for a carouse of some sort, and until then, thank God! I don't dine out save on Xmas day. Nor in 1897—by all that's holy! ever again! I have been quite smothered with it these two months—and it's getting far beyond a joke.... I see no literary fry, and languish in incorrigible obscurity. I had a fevered dream that The Other House might reach a second edition—but it declines to do anything of the sort, and the pauper's grave continues to yawn. Nevertheless—as it is assured any way—I may go to Italy on April 1st. Meanwhile, my dear Norris, I think of you with a degree of envy which even the manners of Topper scarce avail to diminish—I mean because you have a beautiful home and are so many miles nearer than I am to nature. You are also nearer to Miss Norris, and that is another advantage, even though it does make a hole in £50! I have nothing better to offer her on Xmas a.m. than the very friendly handshake of yours and hers, my dear Norris, affectionately and always,
HENRY JAMES.
To Arthur Christopher Benson.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
December 28th, 1896.
My dear Arthur,
Your generous letter has, this wild, mild, soft, sombre morning, made me feel as if I were standing beside you, with my hand on your shoulder, in an embrasure of one of the windows—at that fine old Farnham Castle that I have seen (years ago)—that look out on the noble things you speak of. And the communication in question is worthy, exactly, of the things in question; and grave and handsome and interesting and touching even as they are. "Burn" it, quotha!—it wouldn't have burnt, I would have you know: it would have flown straight up the chimney and taken, unscathed as marble, its invulnerable way to the individual for whom it had just been so admirably winged. You say to me exactly the right things, and you say them to exactly the right person. I can't tell you how glad I am for you that you have all that highest sanity and soundness (though it isn't as if I doubted it!) of emotion, full, frank and deep. If there be a wisdom in not feeling—to the last throb—the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom I shall never either know or esteem. Let your soul live—it's the only life that isn't, on the whole, a sell. You have evidently been magnificent, and as I have my hand on your shoulder I take the opportunity of patting you very tenderly on the back. That back will evidently carry its load and be all the straighter for the—as it seems to me—really quite massive experience. I rejoice that the waters have held you up—they do, always, I think, when they are only deep enough. And all your missings and memories and contrasts and tendernesses are a part—the essence—of the very force that is in you to live, and to feel again—and yet again and again; when, at last, to have so felt will be the thing in the world you'll be gladdest to have done.
I don't know, in spite of your compliment, whether I am much like Gray, save in the devil of a time it takes me to do a thing. What keeps me incommunicative, however, is not indifference, but almost a kind of suspense, a fear to break—by speaking—the spell of some other spectacle—other than that of my own fonctionnement. But I respond to the lightest touch of a friendly hand, I think I may say; and I haven't the slightest fear of breaking any spell in saying—to you—that I seem to myself just now (absit omen!) to fonctionner pretty well. I am as occupied and preoccupied with work as even my technical temper can desire, and out of it something not irremediably nauseating will not improbably spring! I never had more intentions—what do I say?—more ferocities; I am sitting in my boat and my oars rhythmically creak. In short I propose to win my little battle—and even believe, more than hitherto, that I may annex my little province. It will be as small as the Grand Duchy of Pumpernickel—but there will be room to put up a friend. Therefore you must come and stay with me there; in fact I give you rendez-vous on the battlefield itself, the moment the day is declared. I mix my metaphors—but it all means that it's all a fight and that the only thing that changes is our fighting train. Let us then fight side by side, never too far out of sight.